re-title.com

Veils and the wire mesh changed throughout the day with warm or cool light, transparency and shadows. The sound of birds, cicadas and wind were part of the work. High on the slope a very large tank became "The Bunker", covered with white veils, ricin and wild plants growing inside. The veils as sails on open seas, whistled and flapped with fierce wind. With a golden glow, the veils tamed this threatening tank. Through veils. access to the studio, played on visibility.

"The Vessel", a fragile wire structure present in some of my previous projects, here it becomes much larger (15 feet), naked as bones, a transparency and a gesture. It is a large perforated skin, slicing space and accessible to be entered and "navigated". "The Invaders" flanked the diagonal "Vessel", coiled and meandered through the sloping space as intruders or conduits to other spaces as they penetrated through the holes in the walls . Various ladders, clumsy, oddly assembled and with crooked steps, clinging to the thick ruined walls, leading towards the deep blue sky. Ruins visible everywhere in the form of burned, rusted, twisted, discarded mechanisms and fortress like stone walls now broken and exposed. Residuum of power climbing upwards penetrating the open sky. All traces of intense and hard labor as well as violence and death. In the "studio" a heavy iron gear mechanism traversed the space high at the top. There I hung the two upside-down trees used as writing surfaces for the poems and names of the victims of the last explosion. Visitors also wrote notes and made drawings on the leaves, that as they dried, would fall to the ground. The small niche carved into the right wall became "The Altar". In it fresh herbs: incense, rosemary, thyme, sage, lavender, and oregano. White veil bows held the delicate flowering herbs. The base of this "Altar" was covered with broken glass from beer bottles found in surrounding gardens of the Studios/Steam Shops.

All works of art are autobiographical in some way. My history, my body and mind altered the space. These steam shops are overburdened with their own history as an important component of the Black Gunpowder Factory and its direct connection to Portuguese navigation and colonialism in the expanding "new world". They are now a ruin resulting from the deadly explosions caused by black gunpowder and are intertwined with the nation's history.

This history, an essential element of my space was inevitably imbedded in the body of what became my work. Poems by Fernando Pessoa and the names of the men who died in the steam shops in the 1972 explosion, were written in the two upside down trees I hung in the open space - on the single naked branch and on the leaves of the eucalyptus tree. Pessoa's poems were also added daily to the "Poem Base". Change, decay, histories and ruins were the supporting structure for my installation. Tragedy is in the space itself. Life and death are there, side by side. Transformation and entropy move toward the future...